![]() The traffic they generated crashed its server. Fensler handed out VHS copies of the shows to people who asked, then the gallery uploaded them to its webpage. As Fensler and his friends made more of the videos, there were more screenings, which became increasingly packed with fans. “To this day, anytime anybody realizes I was one of the people who did this ancient internet meme, they ask me to do the voice.”įensler’s friend, Doug Lussenhop, now an editor for the show Portlandia, helped with the first GI Joe PSAs, then got them screened at an art gallery in Chicago called Heaven Gallery. Hooker, an LA-based sound effects editor, who played the part of Snow Job. “All Eric told me to say was ‘Give him the stick / don’t give him the stick’,” remembers Fensler’s then-roommate P.K. “Give him the Stick!” “DON’T give him the stick!” The segment quickly ends, with Snow Job singing a sustained: “Aaaaahhhhh!” ![]() Snow Job arrives, as if to help, and says, “’Give him the stick!” then, inexplicably, “DON’T give him the stick!” in a Cockney accent. In one segment, a boy slides across a frozen lake and hurts himself, while his two friends watch in horror. ![]() His friends were enlisted to do the voiceovers, sometimes receiving specific instructions, other times just riffing. “I would just dump all the footage in there, watch it with the sound off, then kinda go from there,” says Fensler. A friend helped him crack the DVD’s encryption so they could edit the PSAs. After rewatching GI Joe: The Movie on DVD, he got the idea to do something with the public service announcements, which were extra features at the end of the movie. Cartoons from his youth were a particular obsession: he loved The Ren & Stimpy Show so much that he’d record the show’s audio and listen to it in his car. Twenty-six years old in 2003 and working at a Chicago commercial post-production house, he made little movies on the side. And looking back at them a decade later reveals clues about the mystery of the viral video.Įric Fensler didn’t set out to make a meme. In fact, their impact can be felt in TV shows, commercials, and music videos being made today. They’re still just as funny and weird now as they were then. (For instance: two kids approach a downed power line and are stopped by Roadblock, who pulls up in a Jeep and purrs, “Who wants a body massage?”)Īlthough there were earlier breakout online videos, “Baby Cha-Cha” for instance (1996), The GI Joe PSAs stand out because they don’t seem dated. ![]() But in Fensler’s tweaked versions, the GI Joe characters drop bizarre non sequiturs in voices and accents not their own. Before YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter were alive to launch a meme in a minute, the GI Joe PSAs went “viral” in a time when that idea didn’t even exist.Ĭreated by a young, Chicago-based aspiring filmmaker named Eric Fensler, the series was constructed out of the public service announcements that were originally tacked on to the end of each show (which ran from 1985-1986), instructing viewers not to play around construction sites or leave stuff on the stove unattended. And no less significantly, at least as far as internet culture is concerned, it was also the year of the “GI Joe PSAs”: 25 weird, short videos made from re-edited versions of ‘80s GI Joe cartoons. 2003 was an important year for American culture: Baghdad fell, the Human Genome Project was completed, Britney and Madonna French-kissed at the MTV Music Video Awards.
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